Sunday, June 18, 2017

A Father’s Day Links Round-up

• The fine Web site Atlas Obscura showcases a variety of pulp-era crime-fiction works featured at the Wolfsonian-FIU museum in Miami Beach, Florida, as part of an exhibition titled In the Shadows: American Pulp Cover Art. The display is scheduled to remain on view at the museum through Sunday, July 9.

• Editors at Literary Hub have gathered together some of their favorite risqué book covers from literary fiction. “[W]hile racy covers are expected for works of erotica,” they explain in an introduction, “literary covers like to create a little shock and awe sometimes too—and when they do, they also tend to be sneakily suggestive, in ways that compel us to keep looking, whether with their titles or their—ahem—representative iconography.”

• Which brings us to this eye-catching collection, in Pulp International, of artist Harry Barton’s numerous paperback book fronts showing men kissing women’s necks.

• You’re likely familiar with the dramatic final scene, from Planet of the Apes (1968), in which an astronaut played by Charlton Heston, having landed on earth in the distant future, discovers the destroyed Statue of Liberty. But did you know that hasn’t been the only time writers and artists have imagined Lady Liberty’s ruin?

• Backchannel examines the power of typography, which it says “can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death. And it can do this as powerfully as the words it depicts.”

• And The Guardian observes that while “the digital revolution was expected to kill traditional publishing,” things haven’t quite turned out that way. Print books, it declares, are now “more beautifully designed and lovingly cherished” than ever.

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